Riders Republic Review – IGN

Following in the footsteps of Ubisoft’s The Crew series, Rider’s Republic aims to tuck the engine of a high-octane arcade racer under the hood of a sprawling online open world, except this time the engine is your legs and the hood. it’s a lot. of extreme sporting events so over the top it would make you blush in the late 90s. It’s a somewhat familiar formula, but what’s really impressive is that (with the notable occasional gambling accident aside) it is overwhelmingly successful in providing the ultimate downhill sports fantasy. Whether I was flying skyward in my rocket-propelled wingsuit or sweating bullets while completing obstacle courses on my bike, Riders Republic woke up the extreme sports fan inside me and kept me hooked for over 60 hours and counting.

Riders Republic uses a structure that will be highly recognizable if you’ve played any of the The Crew or Forza Horizon games: you explore a beautiful open world, take part in exciting races and stunt contests, search for collectibles, and unlock better gear and more. Difficult activities as you go, only instead of driving cross-country vehicles, you’ll switch between a bike, wingsuit, snowboard, and pair of skis to scream down the mountain. Riders Republic sticks a lot to the existing open world racing game formula that we’ve seen many times before, but having an extreme sports version of those racers isn’t a bad thing.

Whether you’re taking air in a snowboard trick competition or flying through the air in a wingsuit race, each of the Riders Republic sports is a blast. Riding a bike is all about the accuracy and management of your traffic resistance meter, which becomes more challenging depending on your terrain. Riding a bike in the snow, for example, is a recipe for disaster best avoided. Using your skis or a snowboard, on the other hand, is all about controlling your speed and momentum while gliding down more slippery spots. And unlike riding a bike, skis and snowboards perform quite terribly on rougher terrain like dirt and pavement. Meanwhile, the wingsuit requires you to hug your inner daredevil and glide or glide dangerously close to hard objects at terminal speed. Mastering every twisty machine Riders Republic offers is challenging, diverse, and guaranteed to result in some fun but nasty spills.

The events in which you will use them can be equally varied, throwing you down dozens of slopes with many different goals to turn things around. Racing makes speed the name of the game, and it can be some very tense competitions that test your reflexes and guts as you go downhill, fly over holes and dodge obstacles. But you’ll also need to master your skills to show off in stunt contests where the key to success is performing tricks and dribbling to rack up points in the style of other arcade sports games like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.

Mastering each field as I won better equipment, leveled up in each of my extreme sports careers, and unlocked even more contests was consistently satisfying, and the incredible amount of things to do meant that cycle never became stale. For example, after hitting my head against a wall in a particularly challenging wing rocket race, I took a break to play some snowboarding trick contests and felt like I had jumped into a completely different game. With so much to do, I never felt exhausted with enough Riders Republic to quit for long, and that’s an impressive feat considering how easy it is to get bored.

The map is also packed with other things to do, whether it’s collectibles to search, enchanting places to see, or organic events to discover, like hidden stunt activities, some of which ask you to complete a crazy task like cleaning an incredibly large gap. or ride a small steel beam through a barrel. Interestingly, the map takes seven real-world national parks and 45 real landmarks and squashes them all into one massive location, where the snow-capped Grand Teton Summit can sit comfortably next to the rocky Angel Arch. This strange mix of real-world locations and incredibly diverse biomes, all tied together, not only is it an incredible sight to behold, but it makes one map feel like several, each with its own remarkable features, colorful landscapes, and wildly different paths to bombard.

Eventually you will level up enough to have access to more difficult activities, including Big Events and Boss Events. Unfortunately, these don’t live up to their name, in the sense that they basically feel like slightly longer versions of the standard events. Rather than doing something crazy like the showcases in Forza Horizon, Riders Republic uses these activities as a kind of skill test to confirm you’ve earned enough loot and improved your skill enough to advance to the next set of challenges. That’s fine, but not as exciting as I was hoping for from a game that constantly shows you its exaggerated qualities on your face.

To help you get through some of Riders Republic’s most challenging undertakings, you’ll unlock new gear as you progress, making everything that much easier. A rocket wingsuit with higher stats will make it easier for you to turn and use rocket boost for longer, while a better snowboard will make you faster in deep snow which would normally slow you down. Obtaining new equipment is essential to being competitive in the most contentious activities and while it is certainly possible to compete with poor equipment, those who have moved (literally and figuratively) to get better equipment have an incredible advantage. So leveling up and earning new gear becomes a high priority and an addictive part of a sandbox that already gives you dozens of reasons to keep racing.

Riders Republic – Gamescom 2021 Screenshots

While you will buy most of those currecny upgrades in the game, you can also spend them on cosmetic things to make your character match your particular style, which in my case meant dressing up in the most ridiculous costumes I could find, like an elephant with suit, a tuxedoed giraffe, or a silly-looking purple unicorn. They really go out of their way with some of the options so that you can make your pilot as ridiculous as you want, and seeing other players in all their outrageous glory is definitely part of the fun.

There are also a host of engaging competitive multiplayer modes, including Free For All ranked races that test your skills against a small group of live players, arena matches that pit two teams of six against each other as you battle for control. of a skate park. , and most notably: Mass Races. The Free for All and 6v6 Arena matches are a good way to pass the time and play competitively if you get bored of competing against the ghosts of the players, but they are also run-of-the-mill modes that I’ve seen in other games before. Mass Races is a completely new beast.

Mass races begin with a server-wide announcement asking all players to stop what they are doing and participate. If you answer the call, you will be thrown into an extensive racing tournament with 64 players and loads of XP and accolades at stake for those who make it to the podium. Unsurprisingly, competing against 63 other players is total chaos, but the kind of chaos that works perfectly in Riders Republic, which seems to welcome you and thrive in it. The sheer horror show of dozens of people shoving each other out of the way, flying off cliff edges, and crashing into obstacles at terminal speed is a sight to behold, even if you find yourself doing a tragic performance. And if you really make it to the podium, the payoff and bragging rights are immense.

The only downside to these ambitious events is that, as you might imagine, glitches sometimes screw things up. Apparently something about grouping 64 players into the same event at a time is not an easy task to accomplish, because about 10% of the times I participated in one it would crash at the main menu, although admittedly it seemed to improve with time. as the launch server issues resolved themselves. Still, glitches and silly glitches are pretty common in Riders Republic, at least on the Xbox Series X where I played. Once I fell across the world map and was met with an inglorious disappearance, and again I smashed into a tree trunk with such force that I was trapped inside it with no way out. But most of the time, encountering a bug just meant crashing into the dash with just an inscrutable error code to keep me company. Seeing these kinds of things in a great online game like this isn’t exactly surprising, especially near launch, but they’re still prevalent enough here to start to get frustrating.